Constantine's Sword and Papal Sin

Dear Katha,

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Isn't it interesting that these two books, not to mention Susan Zuccotti's Under His Very Windows, all three concerned with such similar issues, should have been published simultaneously? No single recent event I can think of would have occasioned this coincidence. And yet here they are, an embarrassment of dissident Catholic riches. One can only hope the authors' publicists are inclined to be cooperative rather than competitive.

Before getting to the substantive matters your letter raises--which, not incidentally, constitute the subject matter of the two books under discussion--I'd better admit to one disagreement with you right at the start. While I admired both books enormously, and (contrary to my expectations, not to mention the promptings of common sense) actually enjoyed reading them both, I found James Carroll's to be the more compelling of the two.

This isn't intended in any way as a derogation of Garry Wills' volume, which is as good as one would expect from the author of Inventing America and Lincoln at Gettysberg, not to mention, more relevantly, a recent brief biography of St. Augustine. In a series of short, sharp, angry chapters, Wills here reviews a variety of ways in which the Catholic Church has failed to live up to the standards of integrity proposed by Augustine back in the fifth century. He is persuasive, provocative, and humane, and despite his stupendous erudition, punchy in a journalistically savvy manner. The book is a relatively quick read (relative to the Carroll, at least), and notwithstanding the potential ponderousness of its subject and its author's earnestness, it also manages to be pretty entertaining.

What it is not, however, is closely focused. Indeed, it could easily have been subtitled, "My Various Gripes With the Church." They all seem like legitimate gripes, and he argues each with the loving passion that befits a believing member of the Catholic community. But still, taking two thousand years of deceit as his territory gives him plenty of room to roam, and despite the book's brevity, roam he does. The parts to which you address yourself in your note, those relating to the church's relations with Jews, occupy less than a quarter of the whole. He also speaks of homosexuality, priestly celibacy, priestly homosexuality, women's ordination, women's rights, contraception, artificial insemination, divorce, annulment, papal infallibility, and the Marian cult (you mentioned some of these in your posting). Wills is a man with a lot on his mind.

Carroll's book, on the other hand, although unquestionably very long, and certainly personal and discursive, strikes me as being far from "self-indulgent and poorly organized." I find it an ardent, eloquently written, profoundly informed meditation, integrating disparate facts and ideas with breathtaking sweep, always circling back on itself but at the same time ceaselessly developing its argument. The book is an exhaustive chronological account of the church's relations with Jews, beginning at the time of Jesus himself and moving right through Vatican II up to the present. The subject is complex and the history long and intricate, but still, Carroll proceeds according to a straightforward thesis: In the aftermath of Constantine's conversion (AD 312), the church became an organ of the Roman state, and as a consequence, its integrity was irreversibly compromised and its antagonism to Jews became endemic. And he further posits that this antagonism resulted from a series of human mistakes that were anything but inevitable.

Fully conversant with modern critical biblical scholarship--by now a vast terrain encompassing history, anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics, along with theology--Carroll is fascinating on the development of the gospels and the establishment of a Christian canon. So much of what is included--on whose authority, and according to what tradition--has occasioned so much misunderstanding and such a wide variety of misinterpretation that one can easily imagine the doctrinal chaos of those early years. It was probably necessary, if the church was going to claim any cohesion at all, for some central authority to attempt to determine the central texts and define their fundamental meaning. But this was not a divine process; it was a human process, and perforce a political one.

One crucial (one might almost say determinative) political battle, which began very early, in the decades immediately following the death of Jesus, attempted to define the precise nature of his ministry: Was he a rabbi who had instituted a new sect within Judaism (as the Jerusalem branch of Christianity, led by Jesus' own brother James, maintained), or had he created an entirely new religion, severed from and superseding Judaism? According to Carroll, these arguments, occasioning some distressingly intemperate forensic fusillades, would be understood in one way by members of the tribe but misinterpreted utterly by gentiles (rather, no doubt, like the dinner-table conversation I remember at my own family's seders). And those misinterpretations would end up justifying (if not causing) two millenniums of hatred and prejudice.

Tomorrow, I will try to answer some of the questions you addressed to me, and add a few of my own for you. But for now, let me conclude by mentioning how exciting I found both of these books, and what a surprising pleasure it was to read them. It's a rare but redemptive aspect of book reviewing, finding oneself reading terrific work one might otherwise have ignored. I don't know if Slate's readers get much benefit from "The Book Club" feature, but on lucky occasions we club members do.

Best,
Erik

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Is the Catholic Church anti-Semitic? This week our critics examine James Carroll's Constantine's Sword and Garry Wills' Papal Sin.

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